The company Tuesday released upgrades to its iWork office suite for iPad adding new features and showing that it's going to put up a fight and not cede the iOS office app space to the 800 pound guerrilla from Redmond. Pages, ($9.99, App Store), Numbers ($9.99, App Store), and Keynote ($9.99, App Store) were revised to version 2.2 adding several new features, most notably a read-only mode allowing documents to be shared without granting editing permission to the recipient, and numerous enhancements to the editing UI.

The improvements to iWork for iOS correspond to changes made to iWork for iCloud made at the same time. 9to5Macreports that Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iCloud (still in beta) received improved sharing options, enhanced editing UIs and support for Retina displays. Like their iOS counterparts All three web apps have been updated with the ability to share read-only documents and to open documents directly from iCloud Mail.

While the changes are welcome additions, will they be enough to slow down the momentum being generated by Office for iPad? Will Microsoft consume all the oxygen in the Office app space?